Even though I use Google Music and have developed Android apps, this is the first time I'm hearing about this service from Google. It looks good but I am going to have to explore it some more to get an educated opinion. But so far it looks like a good start.
Whatever service tries to bring in independent artists, it has to be easy to use. A lot of artist loved Myspace because it was easy to upload music & videos. It was also easy to engage your fans. To them it was ugly but it got the job done.
Though it may not seem like it, the music industry is way behind when it comes to tech trends. At least in Urban music. While I'm not as well versed, people in EDM seem to be pretty tech savvy. In the Urban block, Blackberry's were still the most popular phones until about the end of 2010. Many in the industry considered both the IPhone & Android a toy. So any tech aimed at them has to be simple. For every artist who has mastered using Ableton or Cubase there are ten more who think using Fruity Loops is like launching the space shuttle.
I've been saying for a long time that MySpace could still be successful in the right hands. While it is laughed at as a social network, people still remember it as a great place for music.
I don't think anyone has come close to replicating this since. I'd love to see someone take MySpace, wipe the slate 95% clean and make it deeply artist-centric. Hell, integrate it with Facebook. But make it the central hub for a musician to post news, videos, music, etc.
I thought that this would happen when the group including Justin Timberlake took it over, but so far no dice...
Soundcloud has the artist-centric part down really nicely, but it doesn't have much room for other music-related stuff like gigs, videos etc. I'm still undecided on whether that's a good thing or not, because what they do do, they do extremely well.
Whatever service tries to bring in independent artists, it has to be easy to use. A lot of artist loved Myspace because it was easy to upload music & videos. It was also easy to engage your fans. To them it was ugly but it got the job done.
Though it may not seem like it, the music industry is way behind when it comes to tech trends. At least in Urban music. While I'm not as well versed, people in EDM seem to be pretty tech savvy. In the Urban block, Blackberry's were still the most popular phones until about the end of 2010. Many in the industry considered both the IPhone & Android a toy. So any tech aimed at them has to be simple. For every artist who has mastered using Ableton or Cubase there are ten more who think using Fruity Loops is like launching the space shuttle.